"...Who is the honest man? He that doth still and strongly good pursue, to God, his neighbor, and himself most true..." Constancy by George Herbert...

Monday, May 09, 2011

On Seminary Education

I serve as a trustee for an Episcopal seminary. We recently concluded our spring meeting, and among other items on our agenda elected a new Dean. I'm excited about the future for this school, but I also know that we are in the midst of drastic changes in the life and culture of the institution. So it was with interest that I read this recent article from a Forbes blogger. It is obvious from a surface reading that the author last little experience with seminary education but he does provoke some good discussion....

...the prospects are worse clergy than for other forms of professional education, because there is no legal seminary requirement which stifles professional competition. If you go to medical school, you know you’ll have challenges in the job market, but at least you know you won’t be competing with non-medical school graduate physicians. Ditto for law school; it’s illegal to practice law or medicine without the requisite graduate schooling. Other professions, such as CPA and engineer, require at least the four-year diploma.

If you graduate from seminary and become an Episcopal priest, the church almost certainly required that you get the degree, but there’s no guarantee that increasingly indifferent churchgoers won’t, at the drop of a hat, leave your church and move a few blocks down the street to attend a Pentecostal, charismatic or fundamentalist church led by a high school dropout with generous dollops of the gift of gab, no school loans and probably less overhead...Click here for the entire article...